1. Technical Field
The disclosed embodiments relate to a system and methods for augmenting, and thus enhancing, sponsored search results in a search engine with natural search click events.
2. Related Art
Pay-per-click sponsored search terms are typically listed at the top of a list of search engine results when users search on such terms. Attached to the search terms are the Uniform Resource Locators (URL) links, which a searcher may click to go to marketers' web pages to further search a given result. The history of those who search for pay-per-click terms is usually well tracked because advertisers or marketers who pay for the terms want to be able to track click-through rates of these terms according to their target markets. This is known as optimizing online campaigns based on past success rates of sponsored search terms.
Click-through rates may be tracked for not only sponsored terms, but also for non-sponsored terms (e.g., unpaid listings), in which the latter creates natural search click events. While clicks on URLs within a set of search results can be directly tracked by a search engine, clicks after a searcher is at a marketer's website may further be tracked by using an invisible pixel tag or “web beacon” on a marketer's web page. A web beacon (also referred to as a web bug) is a piece of software code, which is invisible to a web searcher that pings back to a search engine server to close the loop and report on the extent to which a searcher uses a web page, up to and including purchasing activity. Information gathered may also include who is reading the web page and from what computer. Though many search engine or search term sponsoring companies collect natural search event information, they have done very little with the information in terms of enhancing marketing campaigns or providing searchers with more relevant results. One reason for this outcome is that the information is not directly linked to paid-for search terms. Also, the amount of natural search event information is so voluminous, it is often difficult to process or make sense of the information in a useful, cost-effective way.